Joe Biden’s first 100 days

There have been a lot of comparisons between Joe Biden and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. While many of these comparisons have been premature, the parallels are obvious: Like FDR, Biden took office during a major crisis, and he has tried to use that crisis to reshape American policymaking.

But there’s another similarity. When FDR took office during the Great Depression, he hoped his agenda would help people, but also that it would stave off the global rise of fascism and restore faith in US democracy — by showing the public that the American government can get big things done.

President Joe Biden said during his speech before Congress on Wednesday night that there is “no wall high enough to keep any virus out.”

But he has kept in place a Trump-era policy that effectively put up a wall to the vast majority of migrants arriving on the southern border over the last year on the grounds that they could spread Covid-19, even though they may have legitimate claims for humanitarian protection.

President Joe Biden’s 100th day in office is Thursday, April 29, and with that fairly arbitrary milestone comes media hype and “report card” articles from journalists and pundits assessing how the new president has been doing so far (a tradition I’ve indulged in in the past).

The 100 days concept is grounded in some history (Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first to use this framing to brag about his early New Deal accomplishments), and Biden himself scheduled his first major address to Congress to coincide with it. But this cutoff point doesn’t have any substantive consequence, and the focus on it seems to be out of step with the nature of the modern presidency.

President Joe Biden struck an optimistic tone in his first speech before a joint session of Congress, coming after a long pandemic year that has been marked by isolation, loss, and for far too many Americans, death.

“After just 100 days — I can report to the nation: America is on the move again,” Biden said during his speech. “Turning peril into possibility. Crisis into opportunity. Setback into strength.”

There’s a quote often attributed to Winston Churchill, the former British premier: “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried.”

Churchill’s tongue-in-cheek defense of democracy came just two years after the end of World War II. Totalitarian forces had vied for their chance to lead the world, but democratic powers in Europe and the United States ushered in decades of peace and prosperity instead.

Even before President Joe Biden was elected, three letters came to stand in for the scope of his presidential ambition: FDR.

Like Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Great Depression, Biden took office at a time of crisis, and has tried to use that crisis to reshape government. Biden’s team invited the comparisons to FDR, too — just about any sitting Democratic president wants his agenda compared to one of the most successful political projects in US history.

President Joe Biden on Wednesday proposed a $1.8 trillion package that, if passed, would be the largest American investment in child care, paid leave, and early education in recent history — if not ever.

The American Families Plan would work with states to incentivize universal preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds in the nation, provide two years of free community college to those who want it, make child care more affordable for low- and middle-income families, create a new national program for family and medical leave, and expand the maximum Pell Grant for college by about 20 percent. The plan also provides $800 billion worth of tax relief for families with children: It extends the expanded child tax credit from Biden’s Covid-19 relief package until 2025, and permanently expands Affordable Care Act tax credits to lower health insurance costs for millions of Americans, among other things.

Never has the US needed its unemployment insurance (UI) system more than during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Before the coronavirus crisis, the worst week for new unemployment claims in American history was in the fall of 1982. That year, the week ending September 18 saw 680,000 people claim benefits for the first time.

The Biden administration’s theory of policy so far is to go big. The same goes for its politics.

Taken together, President Joe Biden’s $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan and newly introduced $1.8 trillion American Families Plan come out to slightly over $4 trillion in proposed new spending. It’s an enormous investment in American job creation; the last bipartisan infrastructure bill Congress passed in 2015 clocked in at about $305 billion — about one-thirteenth the size of Biden’s proposed plan. And Obama’s $800 billion stimulus plan of 2009 was about one-fifth of Biden’s plan, not even taking into account the $1.9 trillion in Covid-19 relief that has already been signed into law.

I called James Carville hoping to get his thoughts on President Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office.

He obliged — then, one question in, brushed aside the exercise to talk instead about why the Democrats might be poised to squander their political advantage against a damaged GOP.

The dire warning implicit in President Joe Biden’s more than $2 trillion American Jobs Plan — which promises to rebuild American infrastructure, create union jobs, and jump-start manufacturing — is that if it fails to become law, China will outcompete the United States for decades to come.

Biden has been saying that China is “eating our lunch” for months, promising his plan would “put us in a position to win the global competition with China in the upcoming years.”

The US has formally begun its withdrawal from Afghanistan after almost 20 years in the country, Army Gen. Austin Miller confirmed on Sunday. The news comes less than two weeks after President Joe Biden announced that all US troops would be out of the country by September 11, 2021 — a significant achievement that eluded his predecessors.

According to the New York Times, Miller, the top commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, told reporters at a press conference in Kabul on Sunday that he had received his orders, and the US would begin “transitioning bases and equipment to the Afghan security forces.”

Just a few days before President Joe Biden marks his first 100 days in office, a trio of new polls from NBC, CBS, and the Washington Post and ABC show that Americans give Biden high marks for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, while his overall job approval rating remains positive.

But Biden also faces criticism from respondents over his handling of an influx of migrants arriving at the US’s southern border, and Sunday’s NBC News poll underscores the apparent durability of Republican voter fraud lies.

Four years after President Donald Trump began to pull the US out of the landmark Paris climate agreement, President Joe Biden and his top officials are reengaging with world leaders and making aggressive commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The Biden administration has an unequivocal message at the two-day Leaders Summit on Climate this week: America is back.

Senate Republicans have unveiled their $568 billion infrastructure counterproposal. While it sets a substantial amount of money toward fixing roads and bridges, it’s about a quarter of the size of the Biden administration’s proposed infrastructure package.

There’s a wide gap between the price tag on the GOP plan and the $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan President Joe Biden laid out. Not only is the cost much smaller; the Republican plan deals more narrowly with fixing America’s roads and bridges and other forms of transportation infrastructure, while Biden’s does that and more, doubling as a sweeping climate plan and a substantial investment to make long-term care more affordable.

At long last, combating climate change is having a moment in the United States.

Over the course of a few years, addressing climate went from being a backburner issue to a centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, a crucial plank of his economic policy. A career moderate, Biden is an unlikely champion of the issue. But as the politics and urgency around climate change has shifted, so too has Biden.

On Friday afternoon, President Joe Biden announced that he would not increase refugee admissions this fiscal year, saying that the current annual cap of 15,000 — a record low set by the Trump administration — “remains justified.”

Less than two hours later, after sharp blowback from Democratic members of Congress and refugee advocacy groups, the White House made an about-face, clarifying that Biden would actually be issuing an unspecified, increased cap by May 15.

Long-serving US senators have known President Joe Biden for decades. Lately, the most moderate ones are trying to reconcile two Joe Bidens.

There is Sen. Joe Biden, who, over the course of a 36-year Senate career, was an evangelist of bipartisanship and compromise — a theme he talked about consistently throughout his 2020 campaign for president. Then there is President Joe Biden, who welcomes comparisons to New Deal progressive Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with policy ambitions to match.

A $400 billion investment into senior care and long-term caregiving in President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan may not fall into a traditional definition of “infrastructure,” but it’s one of the most popular provisions in the plan among Democratic and Republican voters alike, according to new polling from Vox and Data for Progress.

The new poll, which surveyed 1,217 likely voters about various provisions of Biden’s $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan and has a 3 percentage point margin of error, showed that Biden’s investment to improve and lower the cost of long-term care for seniors and those with disabilities has broad support — 73 percent of respondents strongly or somewhat backed the proposal.

President Joe Biden’s first budget proposal, unveiled Friday, is grounded in a clear vision: The government can — and should — do much more to solve the many problems facing the country.

The Biden administration presented the $1.5 trillion proposal as intending to first and foremost address what it has long referred to as the “compounding crises” facing the US: the Covid-19 pandemic, a battered economy, systemic racism, and climate change. But the administration also says it wants to push ahead of these issues — to, as it has said in the past, “build back better.”

Even a year after the pandemic started wreaking havoc on global supply chains, a chip shortage is still disrupting entire industries.

This year, some of GM’s newest cars won’t have a critical feature — an advanced fuel management system that saves gas — because the company couldn’t get enough chips, the transistor-filled semiconductors that keep so many of the devices we use today running. After announcing in March that customers who buy the new Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups between now and the end of the summer will have a lower fuel economy, GM said Thursday that worsening supply chain issues have led to temporary closures of eight of its assembly plants, affecting about 10,000 workers.

Amid a recent rash of gun violence, President Joe Biden took executive action on gun reform Thursday, including placing new restrictions on pistol modification and nominating an anti-gun advocate to helm the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF).

Biden’s actions are significant but address only a very small part of America’s enormous gun problem. Instead, they represent an effort by the White House to use the limited tools the president has, given the difficulties in passing new gun legislation through Congress, to make some progress toward reform.

President Joe Biden has announced that all adults will become eligible for a Covid-19 vaccine by April 19. The news came as confirmed coronavirus infections continue to rise throughout the US, intensifying pressure to quickly increase the number of vaccinated people to help counter the rise of more infectious coronavirus variants.

“Let me be deadly earnest with you,” Biden said Tuesday at the White House. “We aren’t at the finish line. We still have a lot of work to do. We’re still in a life-and-death race against this virus.”

One of the great ironies of climate politics is that America continues to subsidize — to the tune of billions of dollars a year — the very industries that are most responsible for the warming of the planet. Biden wants to put an end to that.

His American Jobs Plan, released last week, recognizes that if the US wants to hit decarbonization targets, and get climate change under control, cutting off government support for fossil fuels is a logical first step. The proposal takes aim at tax preferences, loopholes, and laws that allow fossil fuel companies to dodge costs and avoid cleaning up their pollution.

President Biden’s $2 trillion American Jobs Plan infrastructure proposal used a broader definition of infrastructure than most people tend to associate with the word. It took on everything from roads, pipes, and electricity to climate change, union jobs, and inequality.

It also provided $100 billion to America’s digital infrastructure, with a lofty goal of giving all Americans access to the affordable, reliable high-speed internet they need to participate in today’s economy. The plan is short on specifics for now, but the vast majority of that money will go to building out high-speed broadband connections to the millions of Americans who still don’t have them. There are also provisions about promoting competition and lowering prices. Biden called broadband internet “the new electricity,” comparing the need for a federal initiative to bring it to all Americans to the Rural Electrification Act of 1936.